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Just a quick one to let everyone know that the camping and caravanning club website seems to be undergoing a redesign. Searching on the main site doesn't work right now, and doesn't work in Caravan Buddy either. You can use the UKCS search engine for now, which lists most of the club websites.

Once they have everything running, I'm hoping that Caravan Buddy will keep working, if they have changed things with the code of the site, then the app will need to be altered to keep working. If this is the case, I will let you all know and will work hard on getting it fixed asap.

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1. 2 is out and will be showing on your devices in the next few hours. Everyone should upgrade to this release, as it fixes a lot of issues.

I've had to really rush in getting the Camping and Caravanning searches working again. They have completely changed how searches are processed which meant re-writing a large chunk of the app. This feature is still very experimental as I've not had time to properly test it (in fact, there is a warning in the app about this). Please let me know if/when it breaks in the usual manner.

New Features

• The big change for this release is the complete change to the Camping and Caravanning Club website, which broke compatibility with Caravan Buddy. That part of Caravan Buddy has now been re-written, and you'll notice this when searching with that club. This is not finished yet and is feature incomplete, but at least it works for now. Future updates to Caravan Buddy should have more features restored as well as new features!

• You can now "Favourite" sites. You need to find sites in the usual way first and then add them to your favourites. These sites will appear in their own section when you normally select a search engine. This is a great way to plan a tour or narrow down a site from a shortlist of favourites.

• Google Earth support, you'll get a choice when tapping the map option. You can either open the regular roadmap, or Google Earth. This will only show if you already have Google Earth installed, as many devices cannot run this app, Caravan Buddy will not offer to install it for you.

• Caravan Buddy is now compiled against Android 4. 0. This means speed increases for those of you with tablets and phones running Android 3. 0/4. 0 or better. Caravan Buddy should now be silky smooth when scrolling on these devices.

• Sharing support has been greatly improved. When viewing a site, you can share the site with a friend or loved one by pressing action, then share (may be under "more"). When the other person gets your e-mail/text/tweet/whatever, they will get the option to open the site from within Caravan Buddy, providing they have it installed

• Added warning when choosing to use the satnav feature.

• A proper progress bar is now shown when searching for sites and viewing sites. This will highlight when your Internet is being slow. Remember you can press back when searching to abort the search if needed.

Bug Fixes

• Searching with the Camping and Caravanning search engine works again now. This was caused by the website redesign.

• Fixed bug which caused very odd results when searching using UKCS.

• Fixed bug which blocked reviews being loaded on UKCS.

• Fixed bug where Caravan Buddy would not always find the images for UKCS sites. It still may fail (if there are no images, for example) but should work the majority of the time now.

• Fixed bug which was adding whitespace to the beginning of items on the checklists when editing items.

• Fixed force close when loading some Caravan Club sites.

• Fixed force close for Android 1. 6 and low memory devices when searching for Camping and Caravanning sites.

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Nice little app, many thanks. Now, I have a request. There seems at present no way to load site location files into Google maps. In particular there is a fabulous collection of camp sites across Europe called Archies campings. http://www. archiescampings. EU/eng1/ There are some 30,000 sites, and it would be great to see them in CB to map them onto Google maps. What do you think?

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Ribs that is very very good and an excellent idea. I would like to see CC club sites on there as well ad would be willing to pay a small amount for this, I suspect many many others would as well. You could also do another section where by independant sites could also pay to be in the register of sites on the app. This would help to pay for the evelopment costs and your time to put it all together. I believe we would all benefit from this. keep up the good work

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Nice little app, many thanks. Now, I have a request. There seems at present no way to load site location files into Google maps. In particular there is a fabulous collection of camp sites across Europe called Archies campings. http://www. archiescampings. EU/eng1/ There are some 30,000 sites, and it would be great to see them in CB to map them onto Google maps. What do you think?

An interesting idea. I'm utterly shocked to see there is indeed no way of loading your own kml files into Google Maps!

That feature wouldn't fit into how CB usually allows you to search, lookup call etc. and would literally be a lot of markers on a map, allowing them to be selected and navigated to. The downside of this is possibly going to poor or closed sites, as well as having no information what-so-ever on the site's facilities.

Adding them to Google Maps isn't possible. CB itself would have to draw the map itself (as it already does) and then maybe pull up navigation when needed. I think you would only get a map, which you can pan around and zoom into, and then tap a site marker to navigate there. Might be useful for people doing a grand tour or something. I'll have to look into it.

Camping and Caravanning club now offers searching for european sites as well. CB doesn't *yet* work with this feature, but I'm planning to have that in the next major release (1. 3), which may become useful.

Ribs that is very very good and an excellent idea. I would like to see CC club sites on there as well ad would be willing to pay a small amount for this, I suspect many many others would as well

CC Club site searching is already included in the app. You can find those by tapping "Search For Site" and then "Caravan Club". Or you can tap "UK Campsite" instead which has Caravan Club sites included as well (and has reviews, which the main Caravan Club lacks). I think this answers your request, unless I'm missing something? Be sure you are using the latest version, which is 1. 2 (this shows on the bottom of the main screen) as earlier versions lacked this feature.

If you wish to say thank you and pay me a little bit of money in the process, you can press the menu button on your device and then press "Go Plus". This will install the Caravan Buddy Plus key for £2. 99 and will also turn off the adverts within the app. Be sure to have both Caravan Buddy and the Plus key installed at the same time (plus is a *tiny* download).

You could also do another section where by independant sites could also pay to be in the register of sites on the app. This would help to pay for the evelopment costs and your time to put it all together. I believe we would all benefit from this. keep up the good work

No new features this time, but a lot of people were reporting these bugs (and some were getting a tad frustrated, including some "colourful" language in the bug reports!), so I spent an hour to fix them this morning.

Once again, your device should tell you later today about the update.

Work is still a little crazy, so don't expect new features for a while, but I've had some pretty cool ideas for when I get the time (probably in the new year).

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there is another app on the Android Market called iCampsites it's not geared for Caravanners specifically unfortunately (motorhome app but many shared facets) but it hosts the database of 8600+ campsites / aires / stellplatz etc actually within the app so has limited functionality totally offline from a cellular / wireless connection (Note: I am associated with its development hence me not linking directly to it )

I downloaded your Caravan Buddy App, its nicely done btw, does it screenscrape the different club sites and submit forms for the searches ?

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I downloaded your Caravan Buddy App, its nicely done btw, does it screenscrape the different club sites and submit forms for the searches ?

Pretty much, yeah. This is the most difficult part of the app to program, and is the part which fails the most when site owners tweak the site from time to time. When the C&CC redesigned their site, I had to re-write entire routines within the app, which was fun!

An updated version should be out in a few days which will have improved C&CC searching, updated CC searching (for closed/renamed sites), and a completely re-written video interface (think YouTube for caravanners, and you're about halfway there. ..)

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I bring you version 1. 3. your devices should be informing you of the update shortly in the usual manner.

The major change this time around is a complete reworking of the "Videos" section. This has been re-written from the ground up to load videos from a database via an Internet connection, rather than internally via the app. You can also search the videos. So far, I've added all of Chris Gosling's Caravan Diary videos, and a few other bits and pieces I added whilst testing. This section will update automatically when I update the database at my end (no need to update the app) and will include a whole lot more than just beginner videos, so hopefully should become a useful feature in it's own right, and not something most people end up ignoring once they've watched the videos. This feature requires the YouTube app, but Caravan Buddy will let you know if it's not installed and will help you install it if you have Android Market installed (most devices will already have the youtube app installed).

I will be adding a lot more content to the video database over the coming days/weeks. Please bear with me during this time, as updating the database is a rather boring job!

Be aware the computer/server which hosts the video database is a tad on the modest side (putting it mildly). The database is tiny right now, and not many people will be using Caravan Buddy this time of year, so I hope it should cope. However, if the server craps out during the summer, then I'll have to think of something else. I'll let you all know here if that happens.

Caravan Club searching and viewing for sites should be working again. The club redesigned it's website, and this broke Caravan Buddy. I didn't even realise until I got a forum message about it (too busy with work and the videos programming!). The Caravan Club website now has reviews, which I'll look into adding into a future release.

Camping and Caravanning Club searches are now greatly improved and are no longer "experimental". You also have to do a quick search on the location, and pick the right one before the app will allow you to continue searching. This was pretty important, as the app used to just pick the first search result and go with that, which meant that searching for a site in "Alton" would ruin someone's holiday, and I didn't want that on my conscience!

The default check-list now include "winding up the corner steadies" as part of the default "leaving" checks, after I got a rather awful horror story of someone wreaking a brand new caravan by e-mail! This will only show if you haven't customised the check-list yet.

There are also some other boring bits and pieces that I won't go into here. Enjoy the app, and as usual, feedback/bribes are always welcome.

Cheers Richard, not only did the CC wreck Caravan Buddy, but after doing a site search on the CC web site this morning it appears that they have also wrecked their own search facility, selecting items from the drop down menus no longer appears to reduce the search criteria you choose from as you go down through the lists eg. Region - Scotland used to give on the next drop down menu Counties only the Scottish regions but now you get the full list dropping down, maybe I should go over and mention it on the CC web site and see if they could put it back how it was, or would that create more work for you?!

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Well, I think it's been far too long since the last update. So, awaking at 6am this morning for some unknown reason, I decided to haul my backside out of bed and be productive, and some of that time resulted in Caravan Buddy love.

So here it is, version 1. 3. 1. This is purely a bugfix release based on crash reports people have sent me. There are no new features here, but everyone should upgrade.

Changes since the last version:

• Caravan Buddy should now be more graceful when it runs out of memory, and will do it's best to let you know before it crashes. Be aware that some of the work Caravan Buddy does is very memory intensive, and some devices simply cannot handle it.

• Searching international sites with the Camping And Caravanning club will no longer crash Caravan Buddy. I hasten to add that searching international sites will still not work, but should no longer crash the app

• Fixed bug in the videos loading code, which caused some devices to run out of memory and force close.

• The word "independent" now replaces "independant"

• Fixed bug where Caravan Buddy would crash when loading a large site picture, but the device didn\'t have the memory for it.

• Fixed bug which caused a crash when loading some UKCS reviews

Caravan Buddy Plus

Caravan Buddy Plus, the key which allows you to use Caravan Buddy without any adverts has also been dropped in price, from £2. 99 down to £1. 49. This is based upon feedback I've received that the price is a bit too high just to remove the adverts, and that you'd like to see either 1) more features in plus, and/or 2) the plus key to be cheaper.

I'd like to stress that Caravan Buddy will always be free for everyone, and (for this app at least) I always plan to make my best work available for free, so I have no plans to make Caravan Buddy Plus have any extra features, other than the removal of adverts. The key is purely a way of saying "thank you" to me, if you want to do so. Otherwise, feel free to use Caravan Buddy for free with a clear conscience.

It's not something I had considered. I am aware that Blackberry made a compatibility layer, might be worth some investigation. If it doesn't require major changes to Caravan Buddy, it may be worth a try.

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It's not something I had considered. I am aware that Blackberry made a compatibility layer, might be worth some investigation. If it doesn't require major changes to Caravan Buddy, it may be worth a try.

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I sent you a private message via the forum, if you could have a look and fire me a response, we could get the ball rolling on a Blackberry version for you to try out. By the looks of things, Blackberry have made it easy to port applications. Some features will be lost, but I think it may be worth it.

that sounds a great app! i dont know you can but can it be made for iphone? as my android phone is works one so cant use it on that really!

Sadly not, for a few reasons:

An Apple developers account costs $99 per year, which I'm not very willing to pay for, and I doubt I'd see a return from Caravan Buddy every year.

It would mean me converting Caravan Buddy to work with iOS, which is no mean feat, and one of the libraries that Caravan Buddy uses is not available for iOS, making it very difficult.

I'd have to buy an Apple computer, apparently, and they aren't cheap.

If I were making mega-bucks out of it, then the effort would be well spent. But as Caravan Buddy is just a fun labor of love during my limited free time, sadly, it's just not feasible for the amount of effort needed.

If it's any help, the app doesn't take up very much space on Android at all, it shouldn't get in the way of anything, work may not even notice!

Feedback is welcome. As well as a new name for the app!

'Caravandroid' Just a thought

Ah, well the name has kinda stuck now, and I've become fond of it, thanks for helping though